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Print Cost Calculator

Work out the real cost per page and per job of printing — ink, paper, duplex and printer amortisation — and compare printing at home with a print shop.

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Print Cost Calculator is free to use as often as you like, directly from this page. It sits under Data & computing in our catalogue, alongside Print size calculator and ASCII Table Reference.

How to use it

  1. Open the tool — no signup or install needed.
  2. Enter your input or adjust the available options.
  3. Get your result instantly, then copy or download it.

Frequently asked questions

What is Print Cost Calculator?

Work out the real cost per page and per job of printing — ink, paper, duplex and printer amortisation — and compare printing at home with a print shop.

When would I actually use this?

Finding out how big a thing will be before you make it: how many gigabytes an hour of footage takes, how long a file needs on the connection you have, how large a photo prints before it goes soft, what bitrate fits the budget you were given.

What is the most common mistake?

Taking the advertised connection speed as the transfer speed. A 100 Mb/s line is megabits, the file is in megabytes, and the eight-fold difference between them is where most download estimates go wrong — before overhead and contention take their own share.

How is Print Cost Calculator different from Print size calculator?

They sit next to each other but answer different questions: Print size calculator is the one to open when you need it to find the maximum print size of an image from its pixel dimensions and DPI. Pick whichever matches what you're starting from — both are free.

Is there a tool for the next step?

ASCII Table Reference is the closest one after this: Full ASCII table (0-127) with a decimal / hex / octal / binary / character converter and a text-to-codes panel.

What else is worth having open alongside it?

Citation Generator (APA / MLA / Chicago) and Depth of Field (DoF) Calculator — they come up in the same task often enough to be worth a second tab.

Where do the figures come from?

Byte prefixes follow the IEC convention where a kibibyte is 1 024 bytes and a kilobyte is 1 000 — drive makers use the second, operating systems often report the first, and a disk that shrinks on arrival is that gap and nothing else. Print sizing assumes 300 dpi unless you change it.

Further reading

All guides →
ExplainerThe Golden Hour and the Blue Hour Are Angles, Not HoursGolden hour runs from +6° to −4° of solar elevation and blue hour from −4° to −6°, which is why it lasts forty minutes at the equator, over an hour at mid-latitudes, and above 72.6° in June does not happen at all. The thresholds this calculator uses, checked against its own output.ExplainerCrop Factor: What It Changes and What It Does NotCrop factor is a ratio of sensor diagonals. It changes framing, not the lens — proved by computing field of view both ways — and it applies to the f-number as well as the focal length, which is the half most articles leave out.ExplainerDepth of Field: What Actually Controls ItFour variables set depth of field, and subject distance dominates the other three. The exact formulas, a computed table, why the circle of confusion is a decision rather than a measurement, and what "full frame has less depth of field" really means.ExplainerThe Exposure Triangle Is Three Routes to the Same StopA stop is a factor of two in light. The f-number scale is powers of √2 for a reason you can derive in one line, EV = log2(N²/t) puts a number on it, and the three controls are equivalent in brightness only — never in the picture.ExplainerHow Big Is That Audio File?Uncompressed audio size is exact arithmetic: sample rate × bit depth × channels × seconds ÷ 8. CD audio is 176,400 bytes per second. A 320 kbps MP3, by contrast, is bitrate × duration and does not depend on the sample rate at all — 2,400,000 bytes a minute whether it came from 44.1 or 48 kHz.ExplainerScreen Resolution, Pixel Density, and the Numbers Marketing UsesA diagonal plus an aspect ratio gives you width and height by Pythagoras, and the answer is not what the marketing implies: a 27-inch 21:9 has 16.2% less area than a 27-inch 16:9. Then pixels per degree, which shows the highest-PPI phone is not the sharpest thing you own.